Runtu wrote:Why do you think the Church uses to publish financial information but stopped around 1959?
According to Quinn, there was some embarrassment that because of Moyle's overzealous building projects, there was a deficit in 1959, and the church was reluctant to declare that publicly.[/
Runtu wrote:Why do you think the Church uses to publish financial information but stopped around 1959?
According to Quinn, there was some embarrassment that because of Moyle's overzealous building projects, there was a deficit in 1959, and the church was reluctant to declare that publicly.[/
I am waiting for a cite. Please.
OK, here you go:
This movement was linked with the fact that the LDS church issued its last public statement of expenditures at the April 1959 conference. Moyle, appointed second counselor two months later, assumed direction of Church finances, with President David O. McKay's optimistic encouragement. President Moyle immediately set aside the current budget and launched a massive increase of expenditures, especially in the construction of new buildings. Six months later the LDS church had spent $8 million more than it had received in 1959. This was extraordinary when compared to the Church's surplus income of $7 million after 1958's expenditures. Because the last published report of expenditures included the building program, Elder Moyle persuaded President McKay not to publish even an abbreviated accounting of Church spending. There has been no itemized financial report of LDS expenditures from 1960 onward.3
President Moyle's financial program for the LDS church was fundamentally linked with his missionary program. First, he expected a major increase of tithing revenues from a significant rise in convert baptisms. Second, he was convinced that massive increases in Church membership meant there soon would be a thousand Mormons in towns and cities where now there were only a few dozen. Therefore, Counselor Moyle ordered the LDS church building program to construct meetinghouses for that projected growth rather than for the current needs of thousands of small branches.
This massive building program plunged the LDS church into huge spending deficits. At the time, Apostle Harold B. Lee waged a losing battle in what he called "my stubborn resistance to the principle of `deficit spending,' supposedly justified in the hope of increasing the tithing of the Church to cover the deficit."4 Such an increase in the building program required a virtual explosion in the number of tithe-payers to avoid bankrupting the Church. In effect, this left the Church's financial survival directly in hands of youthful full-time missionaries.
The nickname of "New Era" for this missionary program was linked to Church finances, to David O. McKay, and to Great Britain. The First Presidency's financial secretary had proclaimed in the mid-1950s that projected increases of tithing revenues constituted "a new era in the financial history of the Church."5 At the dedication of the London Temple in September 1958, President McKay used the phrase "New Era," and the British Mission president rephrased his words as: "This is a New Era in the British Mission."6
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Goals, quotas, comparative charts, incentives, material rewards, and deadlines were among the "well-known salesmanship techniques" that Henry D. Moyle made part of the LDS church's world-wide missionary work. Equally important was Moyle's emphasis on baptizing young males whom he expected to become tithe-paying breadwinners and heads of LDS families.
In tandem with the New Era of missionary work, Moyle's protege Wendell Mendenhall was chair of the LDS Church Building Committee, and Mendenhall accelerated church construction world-wide from 1959 onward. For example, in 1960 the two men addressed a meeting of mission presidents, missionaries, and local leaders in England. They praised the missionaries for using baseball instruction to baptize young boys and for accepting goals to double the current year's number of baptisms. They also explained that this rate of growth required the LDS church to complete a new meetinghouse every day in Great Britain alone.10
To assist this accelerated building effort in 1960, the Church began having young men serve two-year building missions in Britain and continental Europe.11 This had double benefits in providing cheap labor for constructing chapels and in keeping the teenage boys active in the Church. Nearly all of them converted without their parents.12
Nevertheless, even with voluntary labor, the construction of new meetinghouses almost single-handedly pushed the LDS church to a $32 million deficit for 1962. Moyle's building program assumed long-term population growth of extraordinary proportions, yet paying for it required immediate tithing increases. "I wonder where all the money will come from," the Twelve's president wrote.13 There was already a shortfall of $5 million for the first two months of 1963, and the year's outlay threatened to equal or exceed the Church's $32 million deficit of 1962.14 Mormonism was teetering on the edge of a financial crisis.
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IN the summer of 1963, the Church was in a crisis which resulted in the downfall of Counselor Moyle. As recently as 1957, Zion's First National Bank alone had $70 million in deposits of the Church's once-secure reserves. However, by 1963, LDS finances were so strained that Church "financial officers wondered if they would be able to meet the payroll."63 Then the New York Times reported in May 1963 that the Church of Scotland officially condemned the Baseball Baptism Program as the LDS church's "most insidious approach."64
This negative publicity may have been the catalyst for a move to strip Moyle of his two major responsibilities ("his portfolio," as one journalist put it).65 By July 1963, Joseph Fielding Smith, president of the Quorum of the Twelve, was now openly criticizing "the spending proclivities of President Moyle, also concerning the unorthodox way with which youngsters had been baptized in the Church. . . ."66 The other counselor, Hugh B. Brown, explained that "this resulted in downgrading of one of the counselors in the First Presidency and he died of a broken heart as a result of it." Relieved of his direction of Church finances and of the missionary program, Henry D. Moyle died of a coronary in September 1963.67
From Sunstone Magazine 16 (7) December 1993: 30-44
liz3564 wrote:I agree. Plutarch, you seem to be prone to making judgements without having all of the facts. If you do that in a courtroom, you're probably not that successful as an attorney. Something tells me you only operate that way on a personal level.
I operate off the facts given me; unlike most posters on this board, Harmony uses her personal situation as a weapon against the Church.
But, my personal life is not an issue here, and to suggest that I am a lousy lawyer because of the lousy arguments I make here is, well, kind of silly on your part.
My request for a cite was directed to MS. He said that Clark had urged public disclosure as a means of keeping things honest. I am looking for that cite.
My request for a cite was directed to MS. He said that Clark had urged public disclosure as a means of keeping things honest. I am looking for that cite.
P
Sorry, I misunderstood the request. Just trying to be helpful.
Runtu wrote:Why do you think the Church uses to publish financial information but stopped around 1959?
According to Quinn, there was some embarrassment that because of Moyle's overzealous building projects, there was a deficit in 1959, and the church was reluctant to declare that publicly.[/
I am waiting for a cite. Please.
Here ya go:
By the end of 1959, the church spent $8 million more than its income that year. This was extraordinary in view of the fact that the church had surplus income of $7 million after 1958's expenditures. To conceal the massive increase of building expenditures in the last half of 1959 which created that deficit, the church stopped releasing even abbreviated financial reports.
Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, p. 219
Quinn cites the 12/4/59 diary entry of Ernest Wilkinson for the $8 million deficit figure. Quinn also notes that this deficit-spending continued, reaching an annual high of $32 million by the end of 1962, leading to Henry D. Moyle's fall from grace in 1963 (his oversight of Church finances was given to the newly-called business wiz N. Eldon Tanner, who quickly turned things around).
"Moving beyond apologist persuasion, LDS polemicists furiously (and often fraudulently) attack any non-traditional view of Mormonism. They don't mince words -- they mince the truth."
-- Mike Quinn, writing of the FARMSboys, in "Early Mormonism and the Magic World View," p. x (Rev. ed. 1998)
Plutarch wrote:I will say here that I don't think there is any support for MS's claim. I will apologize if I am wrong. But so far he has just ignored me.
I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but at the April 1959 Gen'l Conference, Clark said:
[W]herever you begin to make great expenditures of money there is always some lack of wisdom, sometimes a lack of foresight, occasionally, oh so occassionally in this Church, a lack of integrity.
Quinn, Elder Statesman: A Biography of J. Reuben Clark, p. 421 (quoting Conference Report April 1959, p. 45).
"Moving beyond apologist persuasion, LDS polemicists furiously (and often fraudulently) attack any non-traditional view of Mormonism. They don't mince words -- they mince the truth."
-- Mike Quinn, writing of the FARMSboys, in "Early Mormonism and the Magic World View," p. x (Rev. ed. 1998)
Runtu wrote:Why do you think the Church uses to publish financial information but stopped around 1959?
According to Quinn, there was some embarrassment that because of Moyle's overzealous building projects, there was a deficit in 1959, and the church was reluctant to declare that publicly.[/
I am waiting for a cite. Please.
Here ya go:
By the end of 1959, the church spent $8 million more than its income that year. This was extraordinary in view of the fact that the church had surplus income of $7 million after 1958's expenditures. To conceal the massive increase of building expenditures in the last half of 1959 which created that deficit, the church stopped releasing even abbreviated financial reports.
Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, p. 219
Quinn cites the 12/4/59 diary entry of Ernest Wilkinson for the $8 million deficit figure. Quinn also notes that this deficit-spending continued, reaching an annual high of $32 million by the end of 1962, leading to Henry D. Moyle's fall from grace in 1963 (his oversight of Church finances was given to the newly-called business wiz N. Eldon Tanner, who quickly turned things around).
Ahh, we hear from Quinn's chief disciple.
Still, I am waiting to see a reference to support MS' specific claim about Pres. Clark. Clark's name is absent from your source. The rest of this stuff I know and knew from the recent book on Moyle.
My request for a cite was directed to MS. He said that Clark had urged public disclosure as a means of keeping things honest. I am looking for that cite.
P
I already gave it, P. Go back and read the bottom of page 3 in this thread. Liz is totally right: you toss out your baloney without first checking the facts.